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How to Easily Build a Targeted Email List with Twitter

Social media marketing is awesome. I love it – and not just because I might not have a job without it. There are tons of ways to provide value, foster relationships, build awareness and so much more on social.

BUT, when push comes to shove, the money is the list – your email list, that is.

Truth: people don’t want to be sold to on social media. It’s a “social” place with a stream of free-flowing ideas and exchange of information.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is anything you can use to entice someone to give you their email address. These work wonders on Twitter. In fact, you may already have the lead magnet created.

If not, it’s fairly simple to create one that will bring in email addresses like flies to honey. Just make sure you’re concentrating on providing real value to your exact target market.

Obviously, you can (and probably should) promote these on other social media platforms. But we’re going to concentrate on Twitter for the purposes of this post because it’s the one easiest platform to drive traffic for free. We’ll go over some methods to get your lead magnet seen on Twitter at the end of the post.

First, let’s take a look at two common types of lead magnets you can promote on Twitter and how they work.

Free Content Lead Magnets

One of the best ways to create a lead magnet is to identify a pain point of your target audience and solve it with a short piece of content people can get in exchange for their email address.

Here’s a great example from Social Media Marketing pro Kim Garst. When Facebook Live launched last year, Kim was quick to produce a free guide on how to use the new platform you can download in exchange for your email address.

It’s a great tweet with a thumb-stopping image and a compelling call to action. It also solves a pain point for her target audience, social media marketers and small-medium business owners. Namely that Facebook live is available but people don’t quite know how to use it and what the benefits are.

Once you click on the link in the tweet, you’re taken to a landing page for the offer.

There’s a little more to it, but above is what you’ll see above the fold when you land on the page.

Landing pages for your lead magnet offer need to be a combination of concise and enticing. Notice how there’s not an overload of information on this page. All there is a headline/tagline, a bullet list of benefits and a form to fill out.

Be careful not to overload people with too much info on a lead magnet landing page. Keep it simple and push them straight to taking you up on you offer.

Lead magnets do great straight from Twitter but also use your website’s real estate to drive traffic to your offers. Sidebars and pop-ups (yes, I know they’re annoying but they work!) are excellent ways to convert your website visitors into email subscribers.

Content Upgrades Lead Magnets

Content upgrades are offers that complement blog posts with something extra people can download in exchange for their email address.

Obviously, the post is about an internal linking SEO tactic and it’s an awesome resource on its own. But check out the offer right after the introduction:

This is a link to a free webinar expanding on that exact topic. Chances are the people who come to this post are interested in learning more here’s an awesome content upgrade for to do just that.

I haven’t attended it, but I bet the esteemed Mr. Patel will be selling something at the end of that webinar, but just the sign up is also building his email list! Pretty savvy.

So now that you know how to create your lead magnet, let’s go over how you get it in front of eyeballs on Twitter.

Get Your Lead Magnet Seen Consistently on Twitter

One of the best ways to make sure people are consistently viewing your lead magnet is to make it your pinned tweet. Do you know you can pin a Tweet to say at the top of your profile for as long as you like? Well, you can and it’s a powerful tactic!

To pin a tweet, simply click down arrow in the top right of a tweet and click the “Pin to your profile page” option.

Boom! Now everyone who comes to your profile page will have that pinned tweet ready and waiting for them right there at the top.

Also, if you haven’t already, set up a queue of tweets linking back to your evergreen content. Use a tool like Social Oomph or Post Planner to set up a series of tweets to go out automatically and recycled to start over from the top when they get to the end of the list.

Create a couple different tweets promoting your lead magnet and add them to your queue. Tweet consistently to create a lead generation machine on autopilot for Twitter.

David Boutin

David Boutin is an expert on Twitter. David is the content manager and wearer of many digital marketing hats at Social Quant in Tampa, Florida. When not staring at a computer screen, you can find David at the local parks playing basketball or staring at a TV screen watching Georgia Bulldogs football.

About David Boutin

David Boutin is an expert on Twitter. David is the content manager and wearer of many digital marketing hats at Social Quant in Tampa, Florida. When not staring at a computer screen, you can find David at the local parks playing basketball or staring at a TV screen watching Georgia Bulldogs football.

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Neal Schaffer is a leader in helping educate executives and professionals on social media as well as in implementing successful social media strategies for businesses. CEO of the social media agency PDCA Social, social media educator at Rutgers University and the Irish Management Institute, social media keynote speaker who has spoken at hundreds of events on four continents, and author of three social media books, Neal is a true innovator and influencer in the growing world of social media for business.